Spotify Volume Leveling / Normalization

I don’t make a point of writing here only on what will benefit me; to my mind, that is a puerile approach.

But I take the point that people are more interested in the unscientific benefits of Hi Res audio, so this aspect almost certainly won’t get the attention it deserves, a loss to all Sonos users that care about the listening experience as opposed to those that chase bits and bytes.

I opened a thread here on this topic four years ago, and there was not one response:-). Had it been a thread on Hi Res, it would have been like a flower to bees.

https://en.community.sonos.com/wireless-speakers-228992/volume-normalisation-across-albums-sources-for-consistently-high-quality-sound-6764671

I am just as annoyed with Amazon on this subject - they do not offer this via Spotify Connect/Amazon Music Cast when it transfers the music stream to Echo devices. But at least one can give a volume up/down command quickly via voice as needed, although this is also an irritating thing to have to do. Instead, Amazon is chasing the HD nonsense, even by pulling the cheap stunt of calling CD format as HD. And which, I suspect, Sonos is copying.

But hopefully sometime in the future Amazon will equip Echo devices with this feature and it will be a simple and cheap matter then for me to get it on my Sonos set up by replacing the Echos that are wired in to it.

Without going to S2..

I don’t see how you can conclude a lack of updates from Sonos staff on a particular issue to mean that Sonos has no concern about the issue whatsoever.  Sonos certainly has a history of keeping things quite when they don’t have anything new to announce, don’t want to make a promise they can’t guarantee, or potentially risk throwing a partner company under the bus.   Of course, people will continue to assume silence = “don’t care” as that’s the default position when you don’t have better information to work on, and that’s a downside that Sonos communication strategy.  

Regardless of that, we do   know that Sonos has their own API they use for integrating streaming services with the Sonos player.  That has the benefit of presenting more consistent functionality on the speakers, a smaller footprint for API code, and streaming services don’t need to build out their own API. It also means that streaming vendors need to do the majority of the work for getting a stream working with features they want implemented, or that some unique features for a service can’t be implemented on Sonos (until they update the API, which could be a large undertaking, particularly if they need to build the logic to normalize the audio).  I am not saying normalization is a unique feature, just that it seems it’s not part of the Sonos API, and we don’t know of Spotify would send the data anyway.

Of course, Spotify could be an exception that uses the Spotify API instead of Sonos API, I don’t know.

The easy answer seems to me that Spotify could simply make the decision to add a setting with your Spotify account for normalized audio, to all players or just Sonos, and then only send normalized audio to Sonos speakers when a request is made.

Then we will perhaps have to ‘politely’ disagree, as the information/data needed to do this is clearly ‘owned’ by Spotify. It’s certainly the place to start at the very least to get the answers to these questions. Only if they do share the information required, do I see it relevant to begin to ask such questions here.

As @ratty said earlier “…Confirm that the normalisation data is made available to Sonos”. 

Should this question, and some of the others mentioned here too, perhaps be put to Spotify, rather than posted, in the hope that Sonos Staff will respond to them?

I think it’s highly unlikely that Sonos will mention what data/information their partners choose to supply them ..and Spotify are ‘perhaps’ slightly more likely to respond to these questions as it is their data source after all.

Sonos rarely, if ever, comment about something that is ‘owned/controlled’ by their partners.

To be fair, you haven’t exactly been charitable to the points I’ve been making either. Pointing out that the Sonos ‘app’ is just a remote control so that you can later on dodge what I’m very obviously saying about the player, on a reasonable interpretation, isn’t a great way to treat what I’ve been saying.

All dealt with here: 

That’s twice you’ve misrepresented my statements.

So that means that the Spotify app on the phone can do this when it interfaces with the servers. Why then can Sonos not do the same? Technical or commercial reasons for not doing this?

Because for the Spotify app playing on the phone to do normalisation, the metadata has to be there on the servers? So something comes in the way of Sonos units not being able to use that information...

Spotify Connect also does not deliver normalisation when used with an Echo device; the only way to get that is to connect the phone via bluetooth to the Echo . Again, a clunky way. 

I suspect that the same would apply to Google smart speakers.

@BadgerMan : When you say that Spotify can put normalisation into your dumb speakers, presumably this is via a bluetooth connection to them, or via a wire to their line in jacks. The latter would also work with Sonos kit that has line in jacks.

Wait wait, on the one hand you want to make the claim that the spotify app is just a remote control, and doesn’t touch the stream, but on the other hand you also want to make the claim that the availability of the normalisation data matters to sonos? Have your cake and eat it too, much? So which is it?

Pretty weaksauce excuse, tbh. They’ve had people asking for this feature for at least 3 years, going by the posts in this forum. If they were interested in doing it, that’s plenty of time. Hell, they’ve developed a whole new app ecosystem in that time (S2), which has been criticised for removing features that the userbase actually liked in the original app!

Spotify offers average track volume information for every music file, that’s how the spotify app can normalise volumes. It can’t be that hard to build that functionality into the sonos app. Sonos are an audio company whose whole value proposition revolves around app control of their ‘smart’ speakers, which apparently aren’t smart enough to support volume normalisation.

If Spotify on my phone or desktop pc can put its normalisation onto all my other dumb speakers but not Sonos’ smart speakers, and Sonos have been getting the request for MULTIPLE YEARS that’s not because it’s hard for Sonos to do it, it’s because they don’t CARE to do it.

Ugh, another large corporation that completely ignores obvious user demand for a feature that would be of tremendous value to users and cost the company fuck all to implement. 

I simply don't understand why this most fundamental of features is not part of Sonos. Any playlist takes songs from different albums, all of which have different volume levels. It's not even like it's a rare thing to experience. It's such a major part of the UX, and it takes the edge off the listening experience for me. 

Surely being able to set a consistent volume that raises and lowers levels by track isn't that complicated, when you consider what else Sonos can do? 

It’s definitely possible - not sure if this is a new feature from spotify but average volume is available for any track, see https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/#object-audiofeaturesobject.